New Vision (Kampala) - November 15, 2006

Yet in 2005, after receiving some US $45m, out of a $201m grant, the Global Fund abruptly turned off the taps.

The subsequent Commission of Inquiry revealed, to the disgust of ordinary Ugandans, how monies meant for lifesaving AIDS drugs were spent on personal phone bills, lavish "Christmas groceries," and medical bills for former ministers.

But six months after the enquiry ended, donors are still baying for blood, a flurry of law-suits challenging the Commission's findings has been filed and the DPP and Police are paralyzed in a confused state of inaction.

This is one of those times when you don't know whether to laugh or cry.

What went wrong? How did the Commission turn what many thought would be an open and shut case into a circus in which the real culprits are likely to evade justice? How was the inquiry bungled?

Any postmortem will recognize that the Commission got carried away with documenting what had happened and made little effort to analyze the much more difficult problem of why it happened. The breathless media stories of a sh350m brokerage commission for introducing the Global Fund to DFCU bank and $30,000 "Christmas groceries" made good newspaper headlines but have ultimately been useless in getting to the real issues.

To understand why the Global Fund self-destructed and who is ultimately responsible you need to go back to 2001 when the idea of a billion dollar Fund to tackle HIV/AIDS, Malaria and TB was first proposed.

The first dire warnings came from economists who argued that poor countries like Uganda would not be able to absorb huge amounts of money with our decrepit health systems and severe manpower constraints. This is the issue of absorptive capacity.

Dr. Kingsley Moghalu of the Global Fund argued, "Yes, of course, a lot of the governments are small; they have weaknesses; and so you say there's not (sic) absorptive capacity.

But consider that in Africa almost 50 percent of all health care providers are outside government. You have mission hospitals, you have private sector hospitals, and then you have government hospitals. So you can see that there is rather more capacity to absorb resources in Africa than we are made to believe.

Our model at the Global Fund has proved that this is so. Fifty percent of global fund resources has (sic) gone to governments, 40 percent has gone to civil society - and that includes non-governmental organizations, faith-based organizations, communities of persons living with the diseases, even academicians" (allafrica.com October 29, 2003).

Taking the "kitchen-sink" approach by letting every "briefcase" NGO apply for Global Fund money must have seemed like a great idea at the time. The Ugandan experience shows how foolish it was.

To compound that mistake, we doubly foolishly allowed the same stakeholders who sit on the Country Coordinating Mechanism that is meant to determine who is eligible for grants - to be eligible for the same grants. This led to absurdities like NGOs without physical addresses or radio stations without any track record in public health receiving whopping amounts of money.

We have learnt the hard way that you can't get around absorptive capacity constraints by simply throwing money at everyone.

The donors who are now crying out for accountability are the same donors who promoted this "kitchen-sink" approach against the vehement objection of Ugandan officials.

I am told that if it were not for President Museveni who stood his ground; Richard Feachem (Global Fund boss) wanted 100 percent of the money to go to NGOs.

The same donors now claim to be shocked that civil-society organizations that they once thought were squeaky-clean have more corrupt tendencies than the late Gen. Abacha of Nigeria.

"In hindsight, maybe we were a bit naive," Victor Bampoe, the Fund's portfolio manager for East Africa said.

"But I struggle to see how we would have done things differently." (Christian Science Monitor, June 1, 2006) This is the closest the Global Fund has come to apologizing for their role in the scandal.

The donors - including the Global Fund - should have known better.

They bear a huge collective responsibility for what happened in Uganda because how they tried to get around absorptive capacity constraints goes against best practices in development cooperation which their countries and organizations espouse.

These best practices are enshrined in several OECD/Development Assistance Committee documents culminating in the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness.

This is an international agreement endorsed by 104 countries (including Uganda), 26 international organizations (including the Global Fund, World Bank and UN) and 14 civil society organizations.

Among other things, the signatories to the Paris Declaration agreed "to strengthen national capacity by avoiding parallel implementation structures." The target they set was to reduce by two-thirds the number of project implementation units by 2010.

Yet back in Africa, far away from OECD headquarters at the Chateau De La Muette in Paris, there has been no let-up in the number of project implementation units being established by these same donors.

This is not to say that the Global Fund money was not misused by Ugandans. Of course it was. My point is that the donors are culpable as accomplices in the misuse of the money because they knowingly promoted a flawed system of aid delivery.

Yet, instead of conducting a swift, clinical probe, the Commission spent several months assessing whether the conduct of the Project Management Unit (PMU) and its boss Dr. Tiberius Muhebwa amounted to embezzlement.

(Full disclosure: Dr. Muhebwa was selected to work as an expert in my Division in the United Nations. He has been a personal friend for over 20 years). Why the Commission went down this route when even the PriceWaterhouseCoopers report stated there was no evidence of corruption or fraud in the PMU can only be explained by a burning desire to "name and shame".

While "naming and shaming" may be an important, albeit unsavory, part of any public inquiry, the Commission descended into farce when Justice Ogoola asked Maj. Gen. Jim Muhwezi - then the Minister of Health - to look into the camera and apologize to the Ugandan people. This was a pure Hollywood moment.

A Commission of Inquiry is supposed to assemble facts and make recommendations; not to pronounce guilt or innocence.

The Judge should have known that the issue of one's guilt or innocence is ultimately determined in a court of law where the accused is allowed to mount a legal defense.

By embarking on an evangelical quest to expose corruption and net some "big fish" the Commission turned what should have been a straightforward forensic accounting audit and technical evaluation of aid effectiveness in the health sector, into a moral crusade.

Justice Ogoola called the inquiry "no less than an audit of our country's moral standing" (Christian Science Monitor, June 1, 2006).

Today, the fall out from the bungled inquiry continues to ripple through our lives. Deserving NGOs have had their grants interrupted. Uganda has missed out on the recent round of grants. The suffering continues.

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